Watching God Paint

Karl Marshall, today’s guest blogger, addresses again the subject of bumps in the spiritual journey – a subject that he raises in his meditation published in The Upper Room magazine for February 14, 2012:

The devotional about my doubts represents only one of the many issues that have plagued me on my faith journey. The beauty about this journey, however, is that the Lord is my traveling companion and always finds the ways – sometimes completely unexpected ways -- to answer my questions. At a time when I had experienced great financial loss and depression following it, I took a trip to escape, traveling to a remote area of the Caribbean.

One day on the beach of a small fishing village, I sat awed by the glorious sunset unfolding before me. A few of the men from the village were present on the beach, and I struck up a conversation with Jean Claude, an old man watching from his stool under a coconut tree. He invited me to his home to share a drink of wine, and I walked with him to a nearby yard with three, one-room wooden dwellings amid a garden of vibrant flowers and plants.  We drank Bordeaux wine from tin cups, and he regaled me with tales about the blessed life he had lived. He pointed to his neighbors’ dwellings and recounted the many ways through good times and through stormy times that they had looked out for each other. If one was ill, the others cared for him; and when another was without food, the others provided. In every way they shared in the blessings they received. Finally he told me, sweeping his hand towards the sky outside, that he had been given the prize of a ringside seat to watch God paint every day. “What more could I want?” was his final question.

I was overcome by the revelation that although all his belongings in that room could have been packed into my suitcases, Jean Claude was wealthier than I had ever been and might ever be. It was a pivotal moment in my spiritual growth. In his face I saw Jesus pointedly demonstrating that when I seek first God’s kingdom by loving God and loving my neighbor, that all my needs will be met.  What had seemed like poverty to me, when filtered through Jean Claude’s faith was transformed into the joy of an abundant life. I realized that trusting God can change the perception of scarcity into the reality of abundance. It was the miracle of a few loaves and fishes offered in loving trust becoming sufficient for the entire crowd.

That experience continues to inspire me in this current period of scarcity in our national life. We suffer extreme anxiety with the news that there are not enough jobs, not sufficient money;, not enough health care;, not enough housing, and tragically not enough peace -- as well as a drought of other necessities. The resulting fear has caused some of us to become selfish and greedy as we turn on each other. Our will to find solutions has become gridlocked. Yet the flip side is that our resources have not disappeared. The vast majority of us have jobs, the wealth of the United States though redistributed has not vanished, and the resourcefulness of our people remains legendary.

It seems to me that what we need most is to exercise our faith and to offer our gifts in trust for the good of our neighbors whom we love. This lesson of exercising trust continues to be the answer to my fear of scarcity. And now, despite my doubts I try to follow it, like Jean Claude sitting back to watch God paint.

-- Karl Marshall